The Art of Enchantmenthttps://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment
Dr Sharon Blackie: writer, psychologist, mythologistTue, 11 Dec 2018 05:59:39 +0000en-GBhourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=5.0.1154403338Life, lost and foundhttps://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/life-lost-and-found/
https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/life-lost-and-found/#commentsSun, 18 Nov 2018 13:04:38 +0000https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/?p=3228Maméan: ‘Pass of the Birds’. Early this morning. Scrambling up a mountain, looking down on Loch an Dá Éan (‘Lake of the Two Birds) or Loch an Tairbh (‘the Bull’s Lake’) depending on the local folklore. I don’t know any folklore about the two birds, but the bull is the beautiful magical bull of Crow [...]

Maméan: ‘Pass of the Birds’. Early this morning. Scrambling up a mountain, looking down on Loch an Dá Éan (‘Lake of the Two Birds) or Loch an Tairbh (‘the Bull’s Lake’) depending on the local folklore. I don’t know any folklore about the two birds, but the bull is the beautiful magical bull of Crow Dubh (‘the dark, crooked one’), the old mountain god, which was killed by St Patrick. As was Crom Dubh … allegedly. St Patrick and his ilk had quite a record of killing pagan beauties. Of claiming to kill them. This place is dedicated to him now, but he’s not the one I talk to when I go there. Other than to tell him his day is over now. That we’re taking the place back. That I’m taking the place back. Bringing the bull back to life, bringing back the serpent he’s supposed to have cast in that lake to kill it. Bringing back the old voices in the mountain. Bringing it all back home.

Twenty-five years ago, I lived in a cottage not far from the bottom of this valley. Now, it’s a few minutes’ drive away, but I can see the mountains across the bog to the back of our land. Being on its doorstep again is like foolishly letting something precious slip away, only to have it returned to you with interest a couple of decades on. A reward for the journey? I don’t know. I only know that it’s a blessing beyond belief.

I’ve never believed in going back; this is the first time in my life I’ve ever done it. Only to realise that it’s not going back at all, of course; it’s coming full circle. Starting the next cycle in the place where it all began. Sometimes that’s how the journey goes. Sometimes that’s when you know it’s time to begin again. To bring back everything you’ve learned to the place you once left. Like bringing an apron full of flowers, and saying – look, these are all for you. And the land laughs, spreads wide its arms, and says – look. This is all for you.

]]>https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/life-lost-and-found/feed/33228Becoming the land’s apprenticehttps://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/becoming-the-lands-apprentice/
https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/becoming-the-lands-apprentice/#commentsThu, 25 Oct 2018 14:01:17 +0000http://theartofenchantment.net/?p=3150Not so very long ago, I spent four years living on and working the land in one of the wildest, harshest and most remote parts of the UK: on the farthest western shore of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The place where the road ran out, and there was nowhere left to [...]

]]>Not so very long ago, I spent four years living on and working the land in one of the wildest, harshest and most remote parts of the UK: on the farthest western shore of the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides. The place where the road ran out, and there was nowhere left to hide. Those of you who’ve read If Women Rose Rooted will know that it was something of a baptism of fire. It broke me open; broke my life open. Four years with my hands in cold, wet, acidic peat which didn’t really want to grow what I wanted to grow there. Four years mucking out pigsties, close-shepherding sheep, cuddling milk cows, crying over dead lambs, burying dead dogs, screaming at ravens stealing away baby geese. Four years battered by the prevailing salt gales from two directions. Four years walking on Llewissian gneiss, some of the oldest and hardest rock on the planet. These are the experiences which tear open the veil for us – which not only show us the opening, but shove us the hell through.

That land taught me everything I needed to know; hurled me headlong into the biggest lessons of my life. I couldn’t have done it by taking a trip. I couldn’t have understood that land’s ecology, its flora and fauna, the way it adapts to every new season. I certainly couldn’t have fallen into that land’s dreaming, come to understand its stories, come to know its mythical characters and talk to them in my dreams. For that, you have to dive deep. You have to stay. And to keep on staying while everything you hold dear is challenged or ripped apart.

I guess I’m not good at dilettantes. To get the stories, you have to make the journey. Otherwise, you’re just stealing a tail-feather from Old Crane Woman. And if you’re going to steal from the gods, you’d better be prepared to have your liver pecked out for your trouble.

It’s this rush to do, to accomplish, which is one of the most pernicious aspects of contemporary culture: it robs us of our ability to fully participate in the process of our own becoming. We want to have achieved our dreams — but we don’t necessarily value the work that must be put in to achieve them. We want to be writers, for example — but we don’t want to spend the years learning the craft of how to write. We see the results all around us, everywhere we look: overnight celebrities, instant experts, pop-up personalities with more form than substance. This is not how it’s supposed to be.

Here is what we’ve forgotten: we’ve forgotten the value of true apprenticeship. And as ever, we find the treasure we imagine we’ve lost hidden there in full view for everyone to see, embedded in our old myths and fairy tales. For at the heart of so many good fairy tales is the critically important concept of apprenticeship. In one of my favourite stories, ‘The Black Bull of Norroway’, a girl must spend seven long years apprenticed to a blacksmith — the only person who can make the shoes which she needs to scale the enormous glass mountain which prevents her from continuing her quest to save her ensorcelled husband. …

The messages are clear: sometimes, you have to step off the path you’re so determinedly striding along, and learn new skills. And learn them properly — through your own lived experience, not experience copied from others; and by continuing to learn for however long is necessary … To fully express our calling, we must be able to tolerate the idea of apprenticeship. To understand what we don’t know, to do the proper research, to find the right teachers, to embody the necessary lived experience before we imagine that we’re ready to share our gift with the world. Apprenticeship requires humility: a little-valued quality in a world hell-bent on glory. All the best fairy-tale heroines knew it to be true: sometimes it’s okay to say that you’re not quite there yet.

Then, I was writing about apprenticeship in the context of ‘calling’; now I’m writing about it in the context of the land. To fully enter into the land’s secrets, and to imagine yourself ready to offer them up to others, you need to live in that land. Not forever, but for long enough. For long enough to show it that you’re serious – no fair-weather friend, but someone who’s capable of true relationship. Who comes not to devour (there’s been more than enough of that) but to cherish. Who’s prepared to put the time in, to commit to being around. And while you’re doing that, you need to court the land. Just as you’d court another human. Sing it songs, recite poems to it, tell it stories – but above all, listen to it. Shut up about you for a while, and just listen. Because it’s not about us. It was never about us. It’s about getting out of the festering prison of our own egos, and letting the land lick us clean of our pride.

]]>https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/becoming-the-lands-apprentice/feed/53150A Psyche the Size of Earthhttps://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/a-psyche-the-size-of-earth/
https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/a-psyche-the-size-of-earth/#commentsSat, 20 Oct 2018 13:22:11 +0000http://theartofenchantment.net/?p=3140‘A psyche the size of Earth.’ I love that image. It’s the title of an essay by James Hillman, the greatest of influences on my own psychological practice, which introduced the collection of articles Theodore Roszak, Allen Kanner and Mary Gomez collated for their book Ecopsychology back in 1995. Hillman, I think, did more than [...]

]]>‘A psyche the size of Earth.’ I love that image. It’s the title of an essay by James Hillman, the greatest of influences on my own psychological practice, which introduced the collection of articles Theodore Roszak, Allen Kanner and Mary Gomez collated for their book Ecopsychology back in 1995. Hillman, I think, did more than anyone to try to remind people that this world, these lives we live, aren’t all about us. It’s a message I passionately believe in. We think we make them up, the stories, the dreams. Well, maybe they make us up. For sure, they have an existence that’s independent of us. We think psyche is in us, Hillman said – but actually, we’re in psyche. The great, beautiful soul of this glowing, animate world.

Once, I read a book in which an indigenous author I greatly admire wrote about the ways in which the foundational myth of the West – the Adam and Eve story, she said: the story of humanity’s Fall from grace, from the garden of Eden – was responsible for so much of the mess we’re in today. She contrasted it with the myths and stories of her own people, which spoke of how interconnected we are with life on this Earth, not how separate we are. And all of that made me sad, and it also made me a little frustrated. Because that’s not the foundational mythology of the West at all. But the Biblical story has been so successful over the past two thousand years at wiping out everything that came before, that everyone seems to think it is. We’ve forgotten so much. We’ve forgotten that this is actually mythology imported from the Middle East, and it travelled west on a trail of blood and book-burning and witch-burning.

The old myths, stories, and yes – even the ancient philosophies – of the West are rich and complex and beautiful. They offer up a world in which everything is not only alive, but has purpose, intentionality of its own. A world to which each incarnated soul chooses to come, for a reason, and to offer up a gift which can only be expressed through relationship with and participation in that animate world. Carrying the fire, carrying with us the image that we were born with, that we brought with us when we chose to come into this world. And there are Others, who will help and guide us if we know how to find them, know how to listen.

But over the centuries, this old knowledge has been deliberately overwritten. And so we’ve forgotten how to listen to the song the mountain sings. We’ve forgotten how to listen to the voice of the ancestor who comes to show us how to take up the shimmering mythlines of the past, and weave them into the tapestry of the present. We’ve fallen out of myth.

We need to find our way back. Back to who we once were, and who we can become again.

At the heart of my work, out of the decades-long, rich foundations of my training in psychology and mythology, is both a longing and a passion. That longing and passion come together, and are fulfilled, when I can help people to find the way to find their mythic ground again. When I can help them remember how to re-enchant themselves – to fall in love again with the world, to find a genuine sense of deeply embodied belonging to this beautiful, animate Earth. To remember, as Carl Jung said, that humans have always been myth-makers. And to take back that myth-making power from the corrupt forces that govern us, and find the stories we really want to live by. Our own stories, our own voices. The stories we sing from our souls. The stories which sing our souls back home.

So, from next year, that calling is finding its voice in some unique workshop offerings. I’m especially excited about the first of these to be offered, in the beautiful land of New Mexico. New Mexico has a special place in my heart. It was there, in 1999, that I finally achieved my dream to be a licensed pilot. I fled the low storm-clouds of Kentucky, where I was living at the time, and hunkered down in Las Cruces. For two weeks, all I did was fly. Solo cross-countries into small desert airports – Silver City, Truth or Consequences, Demming. Battered by heat, strong afternoon winds and fierce turbulence, I managed somehow, anyway, to overcome the intense fear of flying which had (rather curiously, perhaps) stimulated this mad endeavour in the first place. (Well, hey, I was 38 years old and didn’t know who I was any more. It seemed like as good a strategy as any for testing myself to the limits.) So New Mexico gave me my wings, and I still love it fiercely.

In ‘A Psyche the Size of Earth’ workshops, we’ll learn once again how to fully participate in this beautiful, animate Earth, alongside the others who share it with us. We’ll go out and listen to the land’s dreaming, and in the process, we’ll find ourselves getting dreamt. We’ll deepen our relationship with the soul of this world – the anima mundi – in order to uncover and explore not only our own unique mythopoetic identity, but the unique gift, or ‘calling’ – the hidden treasure – which each one of us brings to this world. Through personal myth, fairy-tale narratives and imagery, journeying, dreamwork and land-based practices, we’ll find our own unique bridge to the imaginal world: the mundus imaginalis of ancient tradition; the richly mythic and archetypal Otherworld of the Gaelic tradition to which I belong.

The work we’ll do is rooted in mythology and archetypal psychology – but above all, it’s rooted in authentic relationship with the Earth, and a deeply grounded participation in the land where our feet are planted.

If you’d like to read more about the first of these workshops, next September, at the beautiful Synergia Ranch in the high desert, 30 minutes from Santa Fe in the direction of Albuquerque, please follow this link. Maybe I’ll meet you there.

Now I know why people worship,carry around magic emblems,wake up talking dreamsthey teach to their children;the world speaks.The world speaks everything to us.It is our only friend.

]]>https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/a-psyche-the-size-of-earth/feed/33140To the brave women of America, with lovehttps://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/to-the-brave-women-of-america-with-love/
https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/to-the-brave-women-of-america-with-love/#commentsFri, 05 Oct 2018 12:38:16 +0000http://theartofenchantment.net/?p=3135A month ago, I embarked on my first trip to America in eleven years, for a series of teaching and lecturing engagements. Those of you who are readers of my books will know that I lived in the USA for over five years, leaving at the end of 2001. And it was a strange thing, [...]

]]>A month ago, I embarked on my first trip to America in eleven years, for a series of teaching and lecturing engagements. Those of you who are readers of my books will know that I lived in the USA for over five years, leaving at the end of 2001. And it was a strange thing, to think of being back after so long in a country which I once thought of as home – but which, over the years since I’d left, had become utterly incomprehensible to me.

But the reason I decided to accept some of the invitations I’ve increasingly found myself receiving is that a surprisingly large percentage of the people who take my courses and sign up for my retreats are from the USA and Canada: to my surprise, I find that it’s close to 80%. There’s such a strong yearning there, it seems, for a sense of continuity; for an authentic exploration of ancestral roots and the wisdom of the old ways. And that’s something I’m very passionate about: connecting people back to their old lineages, and showing them how to bring that tradition home and incorporate it into the wisdom which emerges from the very different places where their feet are actually planted. And so there’s still a link, it seems, between me and that big old island out west which isn’t going to be broken any time soon.

Before travelling, I found myself filled with a curious mixture of excitement and trepidation at the idea of being back in America again. Excitement, because my time there gave me so much that was rich, and because so many of the people I met there have remained in my heart. This is a country which once nourished me in innumerable ways; I wanted above all to sit in some wild places and tell them a few good stories about what’s happened to me since I left. I was hoping that the land would think I’ve made good use of those gifts it gave me, so many years ago. Because, as those of you who’ve read my novel The Long Delirious Burning Blue will know, it was in America that I finally learned – in every way that matters – to fly.

And trepidation? Well, for reasons that are undoubtedly very obvious, given the current political climate. I left America horrified at the fact that George W Bush had been elected president; I was going back to a country that had voted in Donald Trump. Like many others with attachments to the USA, I was both horrified and angry – at the same time as feeling dismayed on behalf of all the good people I know over there, who were utterly distraught at the way their country seemed to be heading.

But over the past several months I’ve been filled with immense admiration at the way the women of America, in particular, have begun to really fight back. And please understand – that’s not to say that men haven’t been resisting too. But we women still find ourselves living in intensely perilous times – times that are uniquely perilous for those of us who inhabit a woman’s body. And when we see the ugly misogyny which is still so blatant in the popular discourse, so entrenched in the mindsets of the old white men in black suits who hold almost all the power, then we know all too well that the world of The Handmaid’s Tale is only a few steps away. And that’s not just true for America. I live in a country which is still controlled by white men in black suits – or black frocks with lily-white collars. But women are slowly regaining their voices here, too. This year’s vote on abortion rights is evidence of that.

Over the past few days, just as distraught as you all are by the ongoing series of spectacles in the Senate, by the words of Donald Trump, by the fact that anyone like Brett Kavanaugh could ever be considered to be suitable as a supreme court judge – I’ve been heartened by report after of report about all the women who refuse to give up. Who resist, each of them in their own ways. By marching, by sitting in, by organising politically and drumming up votes for people who espouse alternative politics. By writing and shaming and telling their truths and refusing to go quietly. By, more than ever before, showing just how resolute American women can be.

I firmly believe that, in order for real and lasting change to happen, things have to get really bad first. Because then, we know what’s actually at stake – and it’s everything we care about, everything we want to be. Then we see the people who hold the power for who they really are; we see not only the structures but the individuals who hold us back. And when that happens, the veil gets so badly torn that no-one can stitch it back together again. Thank god. The brave women of America for sure understand that now. And they’re simply not having it any more. Hold on, sisters – we’re with you.

A couple of years ago, I had one of those Big Dreams that Carl Jung liked to talk about. The ones that you know matter, even if you can’t always figure out why at the time. I had it while I was leading a women’s retreat on the Beara Peninsula, in the south-west of Ireland. Beara is the country of the Cailleach Bhéarra, the local representation of the ancient figure known as the Cailleach: the maker and shaper of the land in the Gaelic (Irish, Scottish and Manx) mythic tradition. In my dream, I was part of a raggle-taggle band of people who represented the resistance against some vicious patriarchy or other. There were men and women in my group of freedom fighters, but it was an all-male military which captured us and locked us all up in a seemingly impenetrable prison.

As he turned the key and locked us in, I said to the prison guard, ‘You’d better watch out. She’s coming.’ He laughed. I nodded. ‘She’s coming,’ I said. ‘And when she does, she’ll walk right through these walls, and they’ll crumble round your feet.’ He laughed again, but then a distant sound, like the sound of thunder, began to grow closer, and louder. We all looked up to an open sky that had once been a roof (in that wonderful way which happens in dreams), and a giant woman in a black, hooded cloak loomed suddenly over the prison. The military clustered around the gates, reinforcing the locks – but that old woman just walked right through them. And all the prison walls fell down.

She’s coming. Can you feel the archetypes rising, calling out to us? Can you feel the return of the Old Woman of the World, the one who won’t be denied any more? And the brave women of America are going to walk alongside her, and pull the damn walls down.

]]>https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/to-the-brave-women-of-america-with-love/feed/213135The mythology of rapehttps://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/the-mythology-of-rape/
https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/the-mythology-of-rape/#commentsTue, 25 Sep 2018 15:15:17 +0000http://theartofenchantment.net/?p=3127It’s been an interesting time to spend two and a half weeks in the USA – though of course it’s hard to find a time that isn’t interesting in one way or another these days. On this occasion, as I was travelling the country telling the old Celtic story of the Rape of the Well-Maidens, [...]

]]>It’s been an interesting time to spend two and a half weeks in the USA – though of course it’s hard to find a time that isn’t interesting in one way or another these days. On this occasion, as I was travelling the country telling the old Celtic story of the Rape of the Well-Maidens, yet another smug, privileged politician was being accused of sexual abuse, whilst his (male-dominated) establishment protected him, and the only recourse women had was to fall back on rage again.

If you don’t yet know about the old story of the Rape of the Well-maidens and the lost Voices of the Wells, click here, and discover how one of the oldest stories in what we now refer to as the Grail canon tells us that the coming of the Wasteland was caused by a king raping the maidens who tended the sacred wells – not a wound in the groin of the Fisher King, as later Grail romances insisted (reflecting a very clearly documented tendency as the centuries progressed for everything that gave authority and meaning to women to pass over to men). ‘The Kingdom turned to loss, the land was dead and desert in suchwise as that it was scarce worth a couple of hazel-nuts. For they lost the voices of the wells and the damsels that were therein.’ So says the unknown author of ‘The Elucidation’, a prologue to Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval:le Conte du Graal. They lost the voices of the wells, the source of the land’s life, and the voices of the women who tended them. As a consequence they lost the land’s spiritual heart: the court of the Fisher King. And so we came to live in a Wasteland, barren in body and soul.

Other mythologies have more than their fair share of rape and its consequences. I tend to steer clear of Greek mythology these days; it’s vastly overdone (and often equally vastly misunderstood). I’ve focused in more on my own native mythology. But there’s one character I’ve kept coming back to down all the years: Medusa. Remember Medusa? And what is it that you remember about her? Everyone, it seems, remembers the eyes that could turn you to stone, the writhing, venomous snakes for hair. What a monster she was, we all shudder prettily, caught up in the story and relieved in our hearts that the great man-hero Perseus had the good sense to decapitate her and put a stop to all that nonsense. And what a fine thing came of her death, surely: the beautiful winged horse, Pegasus, emerging from her gaping neck.

But hang on a minute – what about the backstory? Even a monster deserves a backstory. And according to Ovid, Medusa was once a beautiful young woman, one of three sisters known as the Gorgons. Unfortunately for her, those weren’t the best of days to be a beautiful mortal woman: she caught the eye of the sea-god Poseidon, who didn’t think twice (as the gods rarely did) about raping her in the temple of Athena. But it’s easier, for sure, to demonise the woman. Furious at this act of desecration in her temple, it was Athena (never the most sympathetic of Greek goddesses, with a tendency to be utterly merciless to human women who get in her way) who proceeded to transform Medusa into that monster with the power to turn to stone anyone who looked at her face.

Good old Perseus; after taking Medusa’s severed head and using it to defeat his enemies in battle, he presented the head to Athena, who subsequently displayed it on her shield. And, through yet another manly, swashbuckling hero narrative, the name Medusa became a byword for monstrosity. (Yes indeed: as we’ve seen in the case of Kavaunagh and his tight-lipped Republican biddies, and as we’ve seen with Aunt Lydia and Serena Joy in The Handmaid’s Tale, women can be complicit in the patriarchy too.)

So many stories about women who are raped. The great father-god Zeus committed more than his fair share. Leda, raped by the swan into which he transformed himself; Europa, raped by Zeus in the form of a bull. He raped Calliope, and Antiope; he raped his daughter Persephone. His mate Poseidon got in on the act, raping her mother, Demeter. What fine role models they all made, these gods: the finest of role models for our powerful men.

The truth is, these are less ancient myths than contemporary realities. Because when it comes to raping women, patriarchal cultures the world over have had centuries of practice. The #metoo movement has pulled a handful of them up short, but we’ve a long, long way yet to go. It’s time to restore Medusa’s voice, and it’s time to restore the Voices of the Wells. The day of the Hero is done. It’s time to take back our own stories; time to refashion them for a new mythology which remembers the days when women had wings – and uses those newly fledged wings to rise.

‘If women remember that once upon a time we sang with the tongues of seals and flew with the wings of swans, that we forged our own paths through the dark forest while creating a community of its many inhabitants, then we will rise up rooted, like trees. And if we rise up rooted, like trees … well then, women might indeed save not only ourselves, but the world.’

]]>https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/the-mythology-of-rape/feed/103127How to do mythology properlyhttps://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/how-to-do-mythology-properly/
https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/how-to-do-mythology-properly/#commentsWed, 29 Aug 2018 10:09:54 +0000http://theartofenchantment.net/?p=3120For the past fifteen years I’ve lived in locations haunted by herons. My character Old Crane Woman (who I wrote about in The Enchanted Life, and whose stories you can find under this blog in the posts labelled ‘Grey Heron Nights’) sprang from one of those haunted places: a river in Donegal which was home [...]

]]>For the past fifteen years I’ve lived in locations haunted by herons. My character Old Crane Woman (who I wrote about in The Enchanted Life, and whose stories you can find under this blog in the posts labelled ‘Grey Heron Nights’) sprang from one of those haunted places: a river in Donegal which was home to a particularly fine heronry, on the banks of which I lived for three years.

Here in Connemara, our land is bordered on one side by a beautiful fast-flowing stream, a miniature of that Donegal river, which is also beloved of herons. I can sometimes catch them there if I creep down quietly enough; and sometimes, when I’m sitting at the old wooden table in the corner of our kitchen, I’ll catch a glimpse of one flying up from the water and away over the treetops.

To me, heron is more than the beautiful bird whose behaviour and life cycle I’ve studied – though for sure that in itself is more than enough. She’s a creature overlaid with stories – with the archetypal imagery which springs from her place in the unique mythology of the land of Ireland. I’ll stress that point again: which springs from her place in the unique mythology of the land of Ireland. Because, although many cultures have myths and folklore about herons, those myth and that folklore will spring from their own unique culture and the stories which are linked to their places. There will often be similarities (unsurprising, if you believe in the universality of archetypes) but there will also be as many local differences. It shouldn’t be assumed, for example, that because some Native American peoples see herons as symbols of good luck or vanity, that the same symbolism applies in Ireland. Quite the contrary; some Irish folklore suggests that a heron flying over your house is unlucky. But in our older mythology, heron is a liminal bird, and a guardian of the way to the Otherworld. She’s a bird associated with fierce hags, and with longevity.

So, heron: corr, in the Irish language. And corr is also the word for crane – and if you understand the context in which the myths and stories of heron exist in this particular country, you understand that actually, most of the old myths are not about herons at all, but about cranes. Because as the Eurasian crane died out in Ireland, the grey heron arrived to take its place in the ecosystem, and to take its place in the myths and folklore of the people.

The point about mythology is that every mythology is unique – a fact that’s often lost in the most common approach to the scholarly study of mythology these days, which is largely comparative. It’s lovely to find the same themes and motifs in different cultures around the world; it gives you a wider understanding of the nature of human beliefs, and the ways in which, ultimately, we all seem to be asking the same questions about the nature of the world. It astonishes you with the rich variety of the answers we find, of the stories we tell about ourselves and the nonhuman others we share this world with. But at the same time, I strongly believe that if you haven’t also studied one mythology in real depth, you shouldn’t consider yourself to be a mythologist at all.

My emphasis on the importance of really knowing one mythology – and not just the stories, but the context for those stories: linguistic, historical, psychological, even geological – comes from the richness and insight I’ve found in studying my own. And it’s always better, I believe, to study the mythology which belongs to the place where your feet are planted – where you actually live – because to extricate mythology from the land in which it arose, to study it in some ivory tower or on some distant continent – is sort of like trying to enter a paragraph written in a foreign language into Google Translate and expecting something intelligible to come out the other end. You can’t extricate a mythology from the ground which birthed it, from the language it was told in, from the worldview of the people who imagined it and the history which grounded them there in the first place.

Although I’ve read mythology all my life, from as early as I can remember, and worked with it professionally for decades – most recently as a practitioner of depth psychology with a decidedly narrative bent – my ‘proper’ academic study of the subject came with my decision to undertake a Master’s degree in Celtic Studies. I made that decision because I wanted to deepen my exploration of the particular mythology of the lands of my ancestors. And what that study has taught me (among many other things!) is to very carefully evaluate what is myth and what is saga; to judge the difference between the bardic oral traditions and oral folklore; to trace the ways in which we can (or, maybe, cannot) extract the elements of a ‘native’ pagan mythology from the Christian overlay which crept in when the old stories began to be written down. These are insights that you can’t get from simply reading the stories themselves. And no matter how fine a storyteller you are, you certainly can’t get them from just telling the stories – especially if this isn’t your tradition. You need to know the context. The people. The land. The unique worldview. Myth doesn’t happen in isolation, and myth can’t be understood in isolation.

Here in the Irish Gaeltacht, our old mythology is still very much alive. The Fionn stories,* for example, are a living tradition, told today in homes and pubs. They’re not the fossilised remains of a long-dead culture; they’re who we are, here, today. They deserve to be treated with respect; they deserve for tellers of those stories who come from other traditions to not just blunder in, plundering and picking the bits they like best, leaving behind the stuff that seems to make no sense, changing a heron to a swan, or an oak to an ash. And mythology is different from folklore, and that’s a distinction that’s not made nearly often enough. Folklore shifts over time and across cultures. It transforms itself, it adapts to local conditions, it’s eminently flexible. Myth is different. Myth comes from the land, from the interaction between people and the land. As Canadian scholar Sean Kane pointed out in his fine book The Wisdom of the Mythtellers, myth is the power of place, speaking. I’d say that myth is an act of co-creation between the land and the people who live on it. It might be designed to shift over time, as the place changes, and the history, and the worldview of the people who live there – but it’s really not designed to travel. It makes no sense out of its place.

Studying myth in this way – deeply, devotedly, is an act of apprenticeship. Apprenticeship to story; apprenticeship to the mundus imaginalis – the imaginal world – in which these stories and the archetypal characters, creatures and places which inhabit them have an independent existence. I’ve written about the lost art of apprenticeship here before: about the need to ‘understand what we don’t know, to do the proper research, to find the right teachers, to embody the necessary lived experience before we imagine that we’re ready to share our gift with the world. Apprenticeship requires humility: a little-valued quality in a world hell-bent on glory.’ Myth, above all, requires us to be apprenticed to it. To watch it carefully, to listen to all that it has to say, to learn from it – and only then to go out into the world and feel we’re ready, finally, to practice our craft.

* The ‘Fionn Cycle’ (an Fhiannaíocht) is a set of poems and prose texts dating from the seventh century onwards about the mythical hunter-warrior-sort-of-shaman Fionn Mac Cumhaill and his band of followers, the Fianna.

]]>https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/how-to-do-mythology-properly/feed/173120Love Letter to a Boghttps://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/love-letter-to-a-bog/
https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/love-letter-to-a-bog/#commentsTue, 14 Aug 2018 08:19:30 +0000http://theartofenchantment.net/?p=3115This article was originally published at Caught by the River, in 2016, when I lived in Donegal. I am a lover of bogs. There: I’ve said it. I’m a bog-woman through and through. I can lose myself on the long, pale edges of a sandy island shore; I can enchant myself in the shadows and [...]

]]>This article was originally published at Caught by the River, in 2016, when I lived in Donegal.

I am a lover of bogs. There: I’ve said it. I’m a bog-woman through and through. I can lose myself on the long, pale edges of a sandy island shore; I can enchant myself in the shadows and twists of an old-growth forest – but in a bog I come back to the centre of myself again and again. ‘The wet centre is bottomless’, Seamus Heaney wrote in ‘Bogland’, and in a bog it seems to me that my centre is bottomless too, that there are no limits on my fecund, dark heart.

To Heaney, bogs are female, fertile. ‘It is as if I am betrothed to them,’ he once wrote, ‘and I believe my betrothal happened one summer evening, thirty years ago, when another boy and myself stripped to the whit and bathed in a moss-hole, treading the liver-thick mud, unsettling a smoky muck off the bottom and coming out smeared and weedy and darkened. We dressed again and went home in our wet clothes … somehow initiated.’ Somehow initiated. Christened with the sticky black blood that pools in the hollowed-out fonts of the Earth. What finer initiation could there be, there in the secret places of the world?

A bog doesn’t give up its secrets easily, but it calls you to uncover them nevertheless. The lure of a bog-pool, which beckons you over to look down on its bright mirrored surface, the perfect blue of the sky an antidote to the relentless black of the peat. But when you stand over it (if you make it that far) all reflections disappear; there is only you, and the dark. Reach down with your fingers if you dare. Who knows what you might touch? Who knows what mysteries you might uncover? To love a bog is to love all that lies buried beneath the surface, buried in its rich, ripe flesh.

My first bog-love was in Connemara, where I lived in the 1990s; my second was on the Isle of Lewis in the Outer Hebrides, where I lived in the early 2000s – and still I can’t seem to give them up: here I am now in Donegal, in the green hollow of a sheltered river valley which cuts through a large area of blanket bog. This bog sprawls out towards the fertile coastal lowlands to the north and west, and ranges up the mountains to the south and east. The Seven Sisters, the Derryveagh Mountains, are the guardian spirits of this place. They gather round the fringes of the bog like a semicircle of elders, enclosing and protecting the land as it stretches across to the sea. An Earagail, or Errigal, the oratory; Mac Uchta, son of the mountain-breast; An Eachla Mhór, the great horse; Ard Loch na mBreac Beadaí, the heights of the loch of the canny trout; An Eachla Bheag, the little horse; Cnoc na Leargacha, hill of the Larkagh, and old sow-mother An Mhucais, or Muckish, the pig’s back. Every name tells its own story, whispered down the scree slopes and sinking into the bog below.

On the formidable Atlantic fringes of these lands, the stories that have risen up out of the bogs and travelled on through the centuries are mostly cautionary tales. Like all of the western islands, the lochs of the Lewis peatlands were known to be haunted by the Each Uisge. This canny water-horse, given half a chance, would carry off any unwary young woman who failed to see through his disguise, as he shape-shifted into the form of a handsome young man.He’d have her sure enough, if he could, and drag her down to the dark bottom of the loch to be his wife. In all the versions of the story that I’ve ever heard, the girl works it out in the end; the waterweed strewn through his glossy black hair is a careless touch, a dead giveaway. She deceives the Each Uisge in turn, and runs away while he sleeps. A lucky escape, the Trickster girl is told, back in the safety of the village – and yet, staring out into the bottomless lochs scattered through the peatlands of my own heart, I have sometimes wondered whether, lonely in the shielings and with only the cattle for company, she wouldn’t want, somewhere in the undisclosed depths of her wildest yearnings, to fall for the stories of the Each Uisge. To close her eyes, and just this once, to let herself fall. Wouldn’t she long to know the secrets that might lie in the darkest waters of the world?

But then I am a lover of bogs, and to love a bog is to love secrets. To know the places where the bodies are buried. To know the best place to pick bogbean, and make the perfect herbal tonic to see you through a long Hebridean winter. To know where to find the thickest bog asphodel, to dye your homespun yarn a delicate, pale yellow. To know where the lapwing nests, where the snipe hides, where the otter bathes. To know, as your sheep know when you let them out onto the vast summer grazings that circle your croft for miles, where to find the sweetest, softest grass.

I have been as hefted to my bog as our feisty little flock of black Hebridean sheep, defining and then firmly occupying their patch. I’ve been hefted to the bog and to its stories, for stories heft you to a place as nothing else can. All of the bogs I have loved were populated by stories of the Cailleach: the Old Woman of the World, the maker and shaper of the land in the old Gaelic mythology. She’s a hard one, for sure: haunter of the rocky heights, dancing on the hilltops with her winter-wielding staff and her herds of wild deer for milking. In the oldest stories of these Celtic lands in which I am so firmly hefted, to love a bog is to love to dance.

But choose your steps carefully, for out in the black wet heart of the bog, if you step off the track, you may sink in it up to your knees. If you live in the bog, you learn to recognise the firmer land; you come quickly to know it by the texture of the grass, its colour, the particular way in which it grows. If you live in the bog, understanding the land on which you live is a necessity. ‘Deceptive’, people may call it – but the truth is that this is land which requires to be fully known. Like a lover, it will settle for nothing less. Pay attention, the bog says. Where exactly will you put your feet? What is holding you now? In a bog you must learn to look down, to examine and evaluate the land before you step onto it. This is the lesson of the bog, and I can tell you only this for sure: to love a bog is, above all, to learn to love uncertainty.

]]>https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/love-letter-to-a-bog/feed/43115Grace in a time of droughthttps://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/grace-in-a-time-of-drought/
https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/grace-in-a-time-of-drought/#commentsSun, 05 Aug 2018 10:20:30 +0000http://theartofenchantment.net/?p=3102In the 1920s, Carl Jung was told a story by Richard Wilhelm, a Chinese scholar and theologian, which influenced him greatly, and which he repeated often through his life. It’s the story of the Rainmaker. In the ancient Chinese province of Kiaochou, the story says, there was a drought so severe that people and animals were dying. [...]

]]>In the 1920s, Carl Jung was told a story by Richard Wilhelm, a Chinese scholar and theologian, which influenced him greatly, and which he repeated often through his life. It’s the story of the Rainmaker.

In the ancient Chinese province of Kiaochou, the story says, there was a drought so severe that people and animals were dying. Religious leaders asked for relief from their gods. The Catholics made processions, the Protestants said their prayers, and the Chinese fired guns to frighten away the demons of the drought. Finally, out of desperation, the people of the town called upon the Rainmaker. From a province far away there came a shrivelled old man. The old man asked for a small hut on the outskirts of town, and then locked himself up there for three days and nights in solitude. On the fourth day, it rained.

Wilhelm, who said that he was allowed to interview the Rainmaker, asked him how he made the rain. The old man replied by exclaiming that he did not make the rain, that he was not responsible. Not satisfied with this response, Wilhelm pressed him further. ‘Then what did you do for these three days?’ The old man explained then that he had come from another province where things were in order with nature; but here, in Kiaochou, things were out of order – and so he himself was also out of order. And so, he told Wilhelm, it took three days to regain Tao – and then naturally, the rain came.

In Chinese philosophy, the word Tao can be thought of as the natural order of the universe: that which keeps the universe in a state of balance. It’s similar to the idea of ?ta in the Vedic religion. We don’t have a single word in English for such a concept; we have to use several to convey the same idea. But when I think of conveying Tao in my own language, two words always spring to mind: those words are grace, and flow. ‘Flow’ is easy enough to explain, in that the concept of Tao incorporates the idea that the natural order of the universe is always in flow – it is not in any sense a static condition which might one day be ‘achieved’. And that’s why the concept of Tao is so often associated with water.

And ‘grace’? Well, that’s a more difficult word to crack. Historically, it’s had several meanings, but it’s most often used in a Judaeo-Christian religious context, as ‘God’s grace’ – the notion that God might grant you something which is unexpected, or undeserved. I’m not much of a fan of Judaeo-Christian religious concepts, but I’ve often, recently, found myself using the word grace in a sense that is in some ways similar – but in other ways quite different, Grace, to me, is a condition not only of being in harmony with the natural order and flow of the universe – of being in something like Tao – but a sense that this condition is indeed an extraordinary, unexpected gift: one that is given not in return for ‘good behaviour’ or ‘right thinking’, but just because that is the nature of this particular universe – to offer up life as a gift.

But I can only catch myself in that state of grace – that state which is a remarkable mix of wonder, balance, harmony – when I let go of my grief and anger at what is going on in the wider world. When I stop focusing on the drought that is modern existence, when I stop feeling my determination to call down rain at all costs. When, instead, I simply sit by the stream which borders my garden and watch the water drift by, or creep down to the village loch and listen to the reeds whispering in the wind.

Grace happens when I stop striving. It happens when I tune into what is around me here and now, rather than constantly agonising over the state of the world, and how angry and hopeless it makes me feel. That state of grace answers all my questions about how it might be possible to live well in such intolerable times. Being in grace – being, if you prefer, in Tao – is the answer we need to begin with; the answer without which no other answer can make sense. And in the story that was told to Jung, the Rainmaker brought rain not by striving, not by demanding, not by weeping and wailing, or berating the drought for having the audacity to exist. The Rainmaker, simply by being in Tao, created the conditions in the world around him into which the necessary rain could finally come.

On the one hand, it seems wonderfully obvious – but on the other, simply being in a state of grace sometimes feels too small. It feels as if it isn’t enough of a response to a world which is spiralling into chaos at every level. I’ve come to believe, though, that actually, it’s the only thing that is enough. What we do in the world counts for little or nothing if we don’t know how to be; if we don’t understand that the energy we put out – the vibrations we put out (yes, all these words carry too much baggage, but they’re the only words I have) – affect the world around us in absolutely fundamental ways. Again: the most fundamental way we can affect the world for the better is to attend to our own state of mind – to cultivate the mindsets which bring us into Tao, rather than into chaos. We can choose which gods we serve. And whether we know it or not, we’re always serving some god.

So that’s my commitment to this world and this life, over and above anything I might write, or say, or do. To be, as much as I can, in a state of grace. For me, that means exploring and trying to travel alongside the natural flow and order of the universe. Within that over-arching idea, to be aware (my traditions, after all, are thoroughly Irish) of the flow and order and the need to be in balance with the otherworlds which run parallel to this one. All of that also means a commitment to living mythopoetically: to living in full conscious awareness of the mythic patterns and energies which underlie and inform each of our lives.

The curious thing is that this commitment is undertaken in the full understanding that I’ll never know how much it mattered; I’ll never be able to count the consequences. If my ‘energy’ contributes to the maintenance of Tao, or the natural order, in a radius of just six feet around me, maybe that will be ‘enough’. If it reaches out its Tao-tendrils and helps conditions in the wider world, all the better. The truth is, I’ll never know – but I plan to keep doing it anyway. There’s a curious sense of rightness in that. Because it’s when I detach myself from wondering always what is ‘enough’ – when I detach myself from the need to know what happened in the end – that the Rainmaker inside me is most fully in a state of grace, and the much-needed life-giving rain is finally free to fall.

]]>https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/grace-in-a-time-of-drought/feed/223102The Enchanted Garden 3: the fine art of fruitfulnesshttps://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/the-enchanted-garden-3-the-fine-art-of-fruitfulness/
https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/the-enchanted-garden-3-the-fine-art-of-fruitfulness/#commentsSun, 08 Jul 2018 13:48:42 +0000http://theartofenchantment.net/?p=3084There is always a place in any garden of mine for roses, because roses make my heart glad. But the truth is that there is little that makes my heart gladder than to eat something I’ve grown myself in my garden. To me, the perfect, most enchanted garden is a rather messier version of the [...]

]]>There is always a place in any garden of mine for roses, because roses make my heart glad. But the truth is that there is little that makes my heart gladder than to eat something I’ve grown myself in my garden. To me, the perfect, most enchanted garden is a rather messier version of the classic French potager: flowers, fruit, herbs and vegetables all mixed in together – together with a few hens (we have five) and a bee hive or two. (Or three, in our case.)

Here, baby Red Russian kale seedlings have just been planted between flowers and herbs like this young lavender and feverfew; by the time they are dying back later in the year, the kale will be coming into its own and will feed us through the winter.

We have spent spring and summer of this year (it’s only early July and already it’s been a long, hot summer – in fact, Ireland is suffering from a drought) doing our best to create a fruitful garden. Having learned many lessons from living in bogs and other places with poor soil, we’ve developed a penchant for slightly raised beds: easier to drain, easier to improve. So our fruit bushes have gone into raised beds, and our herbs. We’re currently making a raised bed for potatoes and bean-type things. But the finest raised beds of all are those to be found in the new polytunnel. Yes, a polytunnel! After four years without, I finally have a polytunnel again.

First, an area of empty, uneven ground at the back of our little wood had to be cleared and levelled by Paddy, our neighbour.

Then the construction began, under the careful supervision of Fionn the dog. David is a dab hand at such things, as this is exactly the kind of polytunnel we erected when we lived on the Isle of Lewis, and which I tended for many years.

On Lewis, we had a large Keder polytunnel – the only one which was guaranteed to stand up to the severe gales which used to hit us from both the south and the west. It also has a kind of bubble-wrap as a covering; that makes it especially well-insulated. We grew almost everything in that polytunnel; the strong, salt-laden winds demolished anything which was left exposed outside. And, as you can see from the image below, everything outside had to be inside windbreaks.

Connemara is a gentler land. Here is the completed (except for a bit of tidying up outside) new polytunnel, in the evening light, with silver birch and willows (and the odd giant conifer) in the background. Once you’ve had a Keder, you’re spoiled for everything else. So that is what we have.

And even though it’s only been up for just around three weeks, here are a few things already planted and growing well:

So now there’s a new level of enchantment to each day, and one which makes my heart sing even when the world around me seems to be intolerable. As, these days, it so often does. Regular trips to the polytunnel keep me sane. There is hope in the heart of a seed. There’s a determination not only to survive, but to thrive. To grow and to flower and to fruit and to be everything that it possibly can be, in the space of just one short season. A seed doesn’t know how to give up. It doesn’t know how to despair. It just carries on, being the best that it can be. And to be the best that it can be is simply to be itself.

And there’s hope in the heart of my increasingly enchanted garden, too – for an enchanted garden needs to nourish as many things as it can, in every way that it can. This garden now, just one year in, provides nourishment for my heart in the form of beautiful roses – many of which we’ve rescued from thickets of brambles – and other flowering shrubs which have survived the years of neglect: giant bright blue hydrangeas, cerise camellias, clematis montana rambling madly through the beautifully scented flowering privet which is so beloved of bees. It provides nourishment for the body and mind, in the wildflowers and cultivated herbs which are beginning to clutter its edges, and from which I make teas and balms and hydrosols. Our garden, by design, provides food for birds, for bees, for hens, and for us. Even the dogs are inordinately fond of cooked, chopped kale mixed in with their tea – and a nice raw or scrambled egg when there’s a surplus. It provides food for the insect life which depends on our many native trees. There are cobnuts showing up on the recently planted cultivated hazel trees, and tomatoes ripening fast in the sunny summer polytunnel. Blackberries are slowly forming on the bramble thickets which remain. There is little apparent order in this garden, where ‘weeds’ like nettles and ox-eye daisies, like yarrow and rosebay willowherb, are allowed to flourish on the fringes of the more cultivated areas – but to me, that’s all part of its enchantment.

]]>https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/the-enchanted-garden-3-the-fine-art-of-fruitfulness/feed/53084Myth-making is soul-makinghttps://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/myth-making-is-soul-making/
https://www.sharonblackie.net/theartofenchantment/myth-making-is-soul-making/#commentsWed, 27 Jun 2018 12:40:35 +0000http://theartofenchantment.net/?p=3079Myth is the language of psyche – of soul. And the psychology I’ve actually practiced down all the years (as opposed to the disenchanted, scientistic, experimental methodology I was taught early on) has always been about soul – and has always been founded on a deep immersion in myth. Above all, it’s been about working [...]

]]>Myth is the language of psyche – of soul. And the psychology I’ve actually practiced down all the years (as opposed to the disenchanted, scientistic, experimental methodology I was taught early on) has always been about soul – and has always been founded on a deep immersion in myth. Above all, it’s been about working with the mythic imagination in order to understand, express, create soul.

Soul-making and myth-making: two utterly entangled ideas in that psychology – and mythology – which I specialise in.

But what are we really talking about, when we talk about soul? It’s a word that’s almost always used when we’re speaking about humans. The human soul: my individual soul, or yours. But as James Hillman – founding father of Archetypal Psychology – suggested, psyche is not really in us; we are in psyche. We’re a part of the world psyche; the world soul. Each individual human soul – combined with the soul of everything else that exists – is a part of this anima mundi: the world, ensouled. Everything that we are now, and everything that we might someday become; everything that we see, hear, smell, imagine – all of these things are unique expressions of the anima mundi, captured in a particular time and place.

Isn’t that a beautiful thing? And whatever else we might or might not do or be, isn’t that – at the heart of it all – enough? Not constantly to be striving; not to feel that we have to save the world, or ourselves. But rather, sometimes, to remember to be, like the beautiful rosa mundi bush – the ‘rose of the world’ – which I cherish in my garden, just one uniquely beautiful expression of the anima mundi, in this time and in this place. Sometimes – just sometimes – that’s all we can be. And sometimes – just sometimes – it’s enough.